A Type 1 diabetes diagnosis is a traumatic event. Overnight, a patient (or parent) becomes responsible for administering precisely calculated doses of a lethal drug, insulin, more than twenty times per day. Get it wrong? Coma.
The onboarding process is similarly daunting. Pages of dense, technical instructions. Carbohydrate-to-insulin ratios. Insulin sensitivity factors. This knowledge is learned through months of anxious trial and error, with serious risk attached to every mistake.
What’s striking is that while healthcare continues to rely on this fragile learning model, the tools to do better already exist. In Israel, a country that has mastered behavioral engagement, habit formation and complex systems learning through video games, these capabilities remain largely absent from clinical care. The gap is not technological; it is structural.
Over the past several months in the United States, that terrible onboarding process has been rapidly replaced with… a video game.
A mobile game called Level One replaced months of brutal trial and error with two hours of engaging gameplay. In June 2020, the FDA granted full regulatory clearance for a novel ADHD treatment with no side effects. The treatment could be prescribed by a doctor and reimbursed by health insurance. The treatment was… a video game.
Years earlier, as part of its anti-obesity efforts, the Obama administration spent $2 billion over eight years attempting to get Americans to exercise more. That effort was eclipsed when Pokémon Go got tens of millions of people up and walking for miles. Once again, the mechanism was… a video game.
Why are games so effective? The answer lies in the neuroscience of video game design. Over the last 30 years, game designers have refined techniques that drive learning and behavior change. Video games turn complex systems into intuitive mental models. They carefully balance rewards over time. The result is sustained attention and sustained effort — two things healthcare consistently struggles to achieve.
This matters because patient adherence remains one of health care’s most expensive and persistent problems. In traditional rehabilitation and chronic care, patients are asked to perform repetitive, exhausting tasks with little visible progress. Motivation fades. Dropout rates rise. Recovery slows.
A medical video game fundamentally changes this dynamic. Progress becomes visible. Difficulty adapts to the individual. Engagement rises, anxiety drops and outcomes improve, not by demanding more discipline from patients, but by aligning care with how humans actually learn.
The same principles apply to training clinicians. Medical and surgical video games allow physicians to practice complex diagnoses and life-saving procedures in a risk-free environment. By the time a surgeon enters the operating room, they may have already rehearsed hundreds of worst-case scenarios. Better preparation leads to fewer errors and lower costs.
Sam Glassenberg Photo: CourtesyHundreds of billions of dollars in global healthcare spending are tied up in problems that video game technology is uniquely suited to address, from onboarding and adherence to training and prevention. Yet gaming and healthcare remain siloed industries.
Here, Israel has a rare structural advantage. Elite hospitals, cutting-edge academic researchers and globally respected game studios operate within minutes of one another. Institutions like Sheba Medical Center aggressively pilot new technologies, while Israeli gaming companies have already mastered the art of sustained engagement at scale.
Applying the Israeli game development mindset to healthcare is not a moonshot. It is a practical, near-term opportunity — one that could deliver better outcomes for patients, reduce system-wide costs and unlock significant economic value. The question is not whether video games belong in healthcare, but why Israel has not yet made this connection central to its health-tech strategy.
- Sam Glassenberg has built and sold multiple successful medical video game companies. He will be a keynote speaker on the topic "Unleashing Videogame Tech in Healthcare" at the Tel Aviv Sparks Innovation Conference, taking place January 26–28 at Expo Tel Aviv.